Soft Breaches and Intellectual Property Theft at Oracle
Oracle is suing its rival SAP over alleged theft of intellectual property, specifically tens of thousands of support documents made available to Oracle customers.
Intelligent Enterprise is reporting:
Oracle makes that charge against its archrival, claiming in a civil lawsuit filed last week that SAP employees pretended to be Oracle customers to log on to one of the company's Web sites and copy proprietary technical and customer-support data. Describing SAP's actions as "corporate theft on a grand scale," Oracle claims that SAP gathered the support documentation to provide cut-rate support for Oracle products, then shift those companies to SAP products.
The take away from this is data breaches aren't just coming from hackers breaking into databases looking for identity or financial data. With enough documents, a rival can piece together an impressive library of competitive intelligence information about your company. The question is how to detect this?
Monitoring network traffic can alert you to unusual traffic to a single site. If one customer is downloading unusually large numbers of documents or Web pages, it could be an indication of intelligence gathering. This may not be illegal (or in some cases, as Oracle alleges, it is) but you should at least be aware of who is pulling down large volumes of content. Why they do it isn't something the network monitor will tell you.
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